


Faith

by Wallwalker



Category: CS Lewis - Chronicles of Narnia
Genre: Afterlife, Character Death, Gen, Post-Canon, Redemption, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-26 13:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/pseuds/Wallwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old Uncle Andrew has had the strangest ideas as he's grown older. Sometimes he wonders if that lion really was roaring all along, or if it was something else entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ro](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ro).



> My first YT pinch hit, back in '05. I'd always wanted to give Uncle Andrew a second chance, as best I could.

Andrew was always surprised when he found himself awake again, his eyes opening unwillingly to the morning sun that shone through the window.

He was still in the same white bed. He rarely left, he was so weak... he was too young to be so weak, except that he had made too many youthful sacrifices, back when he'd thought that it was his destiny. But he was always relieved when it was morning again; it meant that the dreams were over for the night, and after all the things he'd seen in his life, his dreams were often quite horrifying.

There was a gentle knock on the door - not the housemaid, of course, since she never knocked. She would be along with his breakfast soon enough, he supposed. Instead it was Digory, who had grown into quite a young man, carrying a knife and a bright red apple in his hand. "Uncle Andrew," he said. "I brought you one of your favorites."

"Oh," he said, "yes, very good." He struggled to sit up in the clean white bed. This had been part of their routine ever since he had first fallen ill, a strange sort of thing; usually they rarely talked at all. But Andrew had had a dream last night, and he wanted someone to talk to; he was glad that Digory had come that day. "Do you know, I always hated apples when I was a boy?"

"So you've said, Uncle Andrew," Digory said patiently.

"Yes, I hated them. Don't know why... too tart, I suppose. If Mabel hadn't convinced me to try these sorts of apples I'd probably still hate them."

They were both quiet for a moment as he carefully ate the apple. His nephew cut it into pieces for him, and he ate them slowly, savoring them; they made him feel stronger, younger. But there was only so much that such things could do; he knew that his time was at an end. Too many trials, too many unsavory experiences... his health had failed once before, after all, and only the country air and the sweetness of a life lifted with that horrendous burden of Destiny that he'd once taken on his shoulders had allowed him to continue on.

"Thank you," he finally said, and relaxed a bit on the bed. "You know, dear boy, I wanted to tell you something. But I'm sure that you'll think I've gone utterly mad again, if I do."

"Oh, that's all right, Uncle Andrew." Digory had never really trusted him again, not since those... those disagreeable times, he called them in his own mind, the last time he'd dared to dabble in Magic. But at least now he trusted him well enough - another comfort to him, at least. "I promise not to laugh, if you tell me."

"Well, all right," he said. "It was a sort of dream that I had, about... about that time when... well, when Mabel was ill," he said delicately. "When you... when I'd made those magic rings."

Digory nodded. A strange sort of shadow passed over his face, which did not surprise Andrew. What did surprise him was seeing it chased by what seemed to be a cheery nostalgia. "Yes," he said. "I remember."

"Well... I'm sure you'll think that I'm mad, my boy, and it IS an utterly mad idea, but... I was thinking about the place that we saw, those horrible animals and the lion who kept roaring on the plains..." He took a breath. It was queer, how difficult it was to say, and somehow the words seemed to stop on his tongue as if they did not want to be admitted. Still, it would keep bothering him until the end of his days if he didn't tell someone, even if it meant that Digory would think him mad again. "Did you ever... ever think that perhaps that lion was..."

He stopped. He couldn't say it - even then, after so many years, not after he'd guarded his mind against such a strange thing. Admitting that he'd been wrong was as difficult for him as it was for any man - more difficult, he who had once thought himself a great Magician. He had given up Magic; it had not quite given him up, however, and perhaps it never would, for he still found his mind drifting to those days when he'd felt somehow important.

"Uncle Andrew, please," Digory prompted. "What about the lion?

He took another deep breath. Imagine, him a dignified man, and he had even considered such a childish conceit... "Did you ever think that the lion was... well... singing?"

His nephew - a student now, well on his way to becoming a learned man, and perhaps already a wiser man than himself - did not laugh. He just looked at him very gravely. "Why, Uncle Andrew?" he said. "What did you think?"

"Well... when we first arrived... I do think he was singing, now that I try to remember it," he said quickly. It was a difficult admission for him; grown-ups have a certain kind of silliness in them as well as children, and Uncle Andrew's silliness had a great deal to do with pride and dignity and other things that were, he'd started to realize, not important in the slightest. "I didn't believe it, and for a very long time I thought that I'd heard things, that he was just growling. I thought he really was roaring after a while... but now I wonder if perhaps he wasn't singing all along."

"Do you remember anything else?" Digory asked him quite urgently.

"Perhaps...." He thought for a moment, then shook his head. There'd been a great many things - honey and a very civil conversation with a bulldog and a pair of trees, one gold and one silver - but they seemed to melt away as he thought of them. The only memory of that strange time that still endured was the one that he had doubted from the beginning. Even the woman - that wild, beautiful, wicked woman, he thought, the one with the devilish temper - had finally begun to fade, after haunting him in too many dreams and nightmares for him to count. "No... I simply can't remember," he finally admitted.

Digory still didn't laugh. He took his uncle's hand and pressed it, feeling the chill in it, and Andrew wasn't at all sure but he thought he saw a trace of a smile on his face. For the moment he did not scold his uncle; he said nothing at all, in fact.

"It was quite a delightful song," Andrew said remotely. "Very quaint... very excitable, most certainly not suited for someone of my dignity... but delightful, now that I imagine it. I begin to wonder what sort of voice he might've had, or what sorts of things he might have said, had I heard him speak...." He found himself chuckling again. "But now you surely think me mad. A lion singing a song... what a ridiculous notion, isn't it, dear boy...?"

"Not at all," his nephew said, his voice so utterly serious that it almost hurt. "Anything is possible, isn't it?"

The old man wanted to ask him what he'd meant, but he felt the bit of strength that the apple had given him slipping away, and felt his mind descend into sleep.

\---

Andrew grew weaker and weaker in the passing days. He still dreamed constantly, and still woke up to the morning light and the taste of sweet city apples and the usual conversations. Mabel and her husband came to see him most often - Letty might have, the dear old girl, if she hadn't passed on so suddenly last year. Too much worrying, he was sure of it; that sort of thing was never good for one's health.

Digory still came every morning, and there was something new in his manner, as if he had much more to say than before. But he never said whatever it was, and the mystery deepened between them, although Andrew never had the strength or the nerve to ask what it was.

He'd had a good few years in that country house, he reflected. It had been such a long time since he'd gone there, and the country air had invigorated him, even as he'd grown old. Ever since he'd given up that conceit of his he'd felt free again, as if he'd suddenly been given a second chance.

And then there'd been the stories he'd had to tell... He smiled wryly, remembering the one that had been his favorite for so many years. She'd been a damn fine girl, he'd always said - a devilish temper, but beautiful despite that. He'd dreamed of her so often that sometimes he wondered if he'd been half in love with her... but the vision of her had changed over the past year, had become a frightening image, a sort of ghost. Now when he saw her in his mind's eyes he saw the terror of her anger, not her beauty. When that had changed he was never sure, for surely her image had become no less beautiful. But the other stories he kept mostly to himself, frightening and mad as they often were.

Then, because Uncle Andrew was quite frail and in very ill health, came the morning when he did not wake up in his clean white bed at all. He came awake quite suddenly in a green, growing meadow, full of wildflowers and the thickest, healthiest grass he'd ever seen. Beside him was a great spreading apple tree; some of its branches were just low enough for him to pick the apples, and from it came the most pleasant smell he'd ever experienced. The sight was so beautiful and so natural that somehow he felt no fear at being in such a strange place.

Then he turned his head and saw the lion, and he felt fear return - for a moment, at least. But there was no threat about him, somehow; he was lying on the grass, and staring at him with strangely knowing eyes. Something about his appearance nagged at him, but for some reason he simply could not remember.

"Welcome, Son of Adam," the lion said - said, he thought, actually spoke, in the strangest and deepest voice that he had ever heard.

"Ah... yes," he said, quite taken aback. "Thank you. But... I really don't think we've met, have we?"

"We have," said the lion. Despite his beauty and his stillness, he inspired... not fear, exactly, but awe. He was quite obviously a creature to be respected. "Are you hungry?"

Andrew did not answer at first. The lion was somehow terrifying, when he looked again - much as SHE had been, but in quite a different way. She had been terrifying because she had been so wild and beautiful and frightening; the beauty was a part of what had terrified him so, because it had been so utterly alien. The great lion was frightening, yes, but not because he was alien in any way; indeed, he seemed so utterly at home in that meadow, as if he had been there from the beginning. Somehow that seemed to set his mind at ease, and he nodded, shy as a schoolboy again.

"If you are hungry, then eat," he said, in that strange, deep voice. He tossed his head as if to indicate the tree by his side. "Let it be a gift to you, Son of Adam."

"Thank you," he said, and walked slowly to the tree, its bright and beautiful apples shining like little suns under its leaves. He took one, and then - surprising himself utterly, for in his mind he was still an old man - he took a bite from it. The juice was sweet and utterly alive; it was a fine thing, far better than any others he'd tasted, and he could not help but think that if he'd had such apples when he'd been a boy, he would have liked them far better.

He finished the apple quickly, and looked up to see that the great, golden lion was no longer lying on the meadow near the tree; he stood next to him, so close that Andrew could feel his breath on his face, warm and sweet. He looked up at the lion's face, and was startled - in a similar way that Digory had once been startled, although he could not possibly have known that - to see tears shining in those beautiful eyes, falling down his muzzle and onto the ground...

"You're crying," he said, more out of puzzlement than anything else. Why would a lion cry?"

"Oh, Son of Adam," the lion said with what felt almost like a sigh, "why should I not weep, when one who has once deafened himself by his own will finally hears my voice? Why should I not shed tears of joy?"

"Deafened myself? But I never-" Then the memories finally returned, as if a curtain had been swept aside, and he looked at the lion with a new sort of wonder on his face. "It's you, isn't it? You're the one who was... was singing," he said. "And this... this is that... that place?"

But the lion tossed his mane. "I am he," he said, "but this is not Narnia. That world was young when you first beheld it, but now many years has passed, and it has fallen. This is another place, where you must now make a decision."

"A decision? What decision?"

"You now know the folly of living with your ears and eyes closed to the truth," the lion said. His shaggy head was so close to Andrew's own face that if he'd wished to lunge, he could've taken his skinny body into his jaws with no trouble at all, but it was impossible for him to indulge in such thoughts then. "But you do not yet know me, and so you cannot yet know what it is that you have neglected. I offer you the chance to learn the truth - to know what it was that you once rejected, but have now just begun to realize."

His head was spinning. He was dying, he was sure of it - or was he already dead? - and this was some sort of hallucination... but what if it was not? What if this really was the place that he'd seen, that lively place? What if this was the same lion that had sung that wild sort of song, the one that had made him think things that he had not wanted to think, but that he now wondered about every time he dreamed?

Andrew had never put much stock in faith. That was, ironically, why Magic had appealed to him so - it was a discipline, with strict rules and stricter punishments for not following them. Yes, they had been mysterious, but once they were learned they never varied... not for him, at least. But faith? Belief in something that he could not prove, and could not discover? What was the point of that?

So he'd believed as a young man, as a man enchanted by the idea of fairy godmothers and other worlds full of new resources and powers. But this older Andrew, who had once looked in the mirror and wondered when his face had grown so much kinder, was starting to wonder if perhaps there was a better way than the road he had taken, the one that had led him down such a perilous path. Perilous, yes, even though he had taken few of the dangers - because even if he had avoided the worst of the consequences, there had always been sacrifices.

Faith... believing that the impossible could happen without incantations, that a lion could sing and a world could come to life before his eyes. Perhaps, he decided, it was time for that after all.

"I... I want to know," he said. "I want to know the truth."

"Then you shall have that chance," the lion said. "Climb onto my back, Son of Adam. The journey is difficult, but you shall not travel unaided."

Andrew nodded - he would have protested, again, that he was an old man and no longer had the strength he'd once had, but somehow that seemed empty. It was as if he was young again, as if the air and the sweetness of the fruit and the lion's soft, warm breath had conspired to make him stronger than he had been in so many years he'd lost count of them all. The lion lay down before him, and he clamored onto his back, taking great handfuls of his mane.

"Hold on, Son of Adam!" the lion roared, and then he was off with no more warning than that - running through the meadow, over the green grass and under the great blue sky, towards mountains that promised something strange and beautiful and true on the other side.

Andrew held on tightly as they ran, thinking of how much stranger and wilder and more true this felt than any magic that he had ever dabbled in and how utterly free it all felt. The lion roared beneath him, and somehow he knew that it was a laugh - and found himself laughing himself, louder and harder than he ever had before, dignity be damned.

\---

Uncle Andrew had died in his sleep.

Digory had been the one to find him; he had come that morning with another apple, another bit of life from the city. He'd come to find him lying cold in his bed, obviously just recently dead... but with a softer and more peaceful expression than he'd ever seen on his uncle's face before in life.

He'd died with that serene smile on his face... Digory thought back to their last conversation, and he could not help but smile himself... smile, and hope that perhaps he and his uncle would someday meet again.

Anything was possible.

  



End file.
